Monday, May 4, 1998
Drum and bass devoid of life, can only drive listeners mad
COLUMN: Musical genre cold, stale, leaves much to be desired
emotionally
So everything on KROQ these days involves some whiny male
nasally crooning about love blah blah blah with a three chord
progression filling up the background liner notes. Yeah, we all get
fed up with the recent trend toward ’70s disco remakes and the
tendency toward flat ska-beat, hunky lead singer rapping down his
lines in tunes you couldn’t hum if you tried.
And yes, we’ve also seen one too many earthy, strong woman ’90s
chicks with their hair flapping in the wind getting angry and
screaming or being folksy and soulful and just plain getting on our
nerves.
No one can deny it’s reached a cold, stale point in the music
industry these days.
Everyone knows it, that’s why the recent success of such
talented geniuses like Hanson and the Spice Girls comes as no great
shock. Also, it would explain the current move toward a more
mainstream embrace of techno DJs, the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy
sparking the public’s interest in slightly more underground mixers
like The Orb, The Crystal Method, Keoki and DJ Dan to name a
few.
However, what I can’t understand and refuse to accept is the
proliferation of drum and bass albums currently on the market.
Obviously, something must be done to charge new life into this
stagnant period of spiritually devoid pop tunes, but a series of
unrhythmic beats set to a few randomly placed notes just isn’t
gonna do it.
It seems to be a kind of avant-garde reaction to the current
lack of musical hits. The strange, stripped down conceptual style
truly does exist on a technical plane far superior to the likes of
other modern music incarnations. Drum and bass does require a
trained background in music theory, or at least an advanced sense
of music meter and rhythm.
But this musical form exists much in the way that Andy Warhol’s
eight hour film titled "Sleep," which involved eight hours of uncut
tape focused on one man sleeping from an unchanging angle, exists.
That is, yeah, it’s art, but it’s not beautiful. It’s not pleasing
to experience, and frankly, it gives us a headache.
I mean, bravo. You’ve discovered a new way to represent an aging
art form – in fact, you created an entirely new musical genre. But
it sucks.
It makes a statement on the absence of spirituality in the rock
world, but instead of attempting to administer a solution to the
problem, it takes the situation to its extreme. It’s like saying,
"Oh, so you think you like the radio’s lifeless, sterile and
comatose offerings? Well, why don’t ya take a crack at this. This
will really blow you away if crappy music is what you’re into."
It’s as though the DJs of drum and bass desire to shove into our
face just how bad the scene has gotten. Just how sick and soulless
we have become.
Tinny, hollow splatterings of monotonous beats zipping around in
no particular melody or rhythm, creeping around the speakers of
your stereo like some twisted freak boy stalking you. He thinks
maybe if he pulls your hair enough and stares at you sinisterly
enough that you’ll relent and give him a blow job.
Or something like that.
Anyway, no matter how many times you crank up the annoying,
jolting notes, they’re never going to entice you into a harmonious,
ecstatic union with the elements around you. Rather, they may turn
the notion of smashing people’s heads in with a baseball bat at
random on your way down Bruin Walk into an appetizing desire.
It will drive you mad. I can’t get through a whole agonizing
album without suffering from the most intense agitation. If I were
in an elevator with strangers (as my roommate Kym decided, it
sounds like coked up elevator music), I would flip out and do
something drastic – like poking the entire group of vertical
travellers with the pointed tips of rolled up gum wrappers while
shrieking the theme song to "Green Acres" at a frequency
comprehensible only to the likes of Flipper.
Even listening to it in my room, I am driven mad. The current
album has been playing for approximately 45 minutes and I don’t
know what to think anymore.
I can feel my brain becoming unhinged, disconnected like a
bicycle with no chains.
It will drive you mad, mad I tell you! I can’t move, I am trying
to cycle away, but where can I go? The room is circling around me,
I can only throw myself spastically from one corner of my confining
cell to the other. I have no will, only the psychotic, treacherous
movements of an enraged muppet.
I try to speak, but no words come. I can only look from one wall
to the next, huddled in a small ball on the edge of my chair,
spitting out random machine sounds.
"PoP. CrEek! BAp. Dee-do, Dee-do! Zoink! Pow! PiNk."
The stereo continues to emit the unending spool of grating,
spontaneously placed notes. No rhyme or reason. No rhyme or
reason.
It has become an alarm clock I can’t turn off. A construction
site outside of my window. An eight-inch house bolt that is being
driven, driven, driven centimeter by centimeter into my head at no
specific pace.
Finally, I edge myself close enough – just barely, almost, got
it! – to the stereo to end the head-splitting notes. My pain is
over for now.
Although I respect the musicians involved in drum and bass, I
weep for the angsty youths of the ’90s who are forced to turn to
this rot for emotional fulfillment. Who, in their early teen years,
in an attempt to go against the grain of the current mainstream
media, go insane every night in their rooms by themselves listening
to "Plug" and Roni Size. Who, in their effort to piss off their
parents by turning their stereos up playing music which "they just
don’t understand," are actually falling into a black hole of
spiritually devoid music.
Like, art belongs in a museum, man, not on my stereo. If you
want to make a comment on the lackluster music world as we approach
the millennium, why don’t you try to make something worth listening
to, instead of just giving up?
VanderZanden is a third-year English student.